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Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection. I get emotional.”To make streets safer, he said in an interview, cities should embrace self-driving cars like those designed by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. Now Mr. Vogt’s driverless car company faces its own safety concerns as he contends with angry regulators, anxious employees and skepticism about his management and the viability of a business that he has often said will save lives while generating billions of dollars. On Oct. 2, a car hit a woman in a San Francisco intersection and flung her into the path of one of Cruise’s driverless taxis. The Cruise car ran over her, briefly stopped, and then dragged her some 20 feet before pulling to the curb, causing severe injuries.

Persons: Kyle Vogt, Cruise, ”, “, Vogt’s Organizations: General Motors Locations: San Francisco

☆ OpenAI in Talks for Deal That Would Value Company at $80 Billion
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-20 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

OpenAI is in talks to complete a deal that would value the company at $80 billion or more, nearly triple its valuation less than six months ago, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. The company would sell existing shares in a so-called tender offer led by the venture firm Thrive Capital that would make OpenAI the most valuable start-up in San Francisco, that person said. Amazon said last month that it would invest up to $4 billion in another San Francisco start-up, Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s primary competitors. Over the summer, Cohere, a company founded by former Google researchers, raised $270 million, bringing its total funding to more than $440 million. Inflection AI, founded by a former Google executive, raised a $1.3 billion round, bringing its total to $1.5 billion.

Persons: OpenAI, Amazon Organizations: Google Locations: San Francisco

☆ Researchers Say Guardrails Built Around A.I. Systems Are Not So Sturdy
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-19 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

chatbot ChatGPT last year, the San Francisco start-up OpenAI added digital guardrails meant to prevent its system from doing things like generating hate speech and disinformation. Now a paper from researchers at Princeton, Virginia Tech, Stanford and IBM says those guardrails aren’t as sturdy as A.I. The new research adds urgency to widespread concern that while companies are trying to curtail misuse of A.I., they are overlooking ways it can still generate harmful material. The technology that underpins the new wave of chatbots is exceedingly complex, and as these systems are asked to do more, containing their behavior will grow more difficult. for good uses and keep its unlawful uses behind a locked door,” said Scott Emmons, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in this kind of technology.

Persons: chatbot ChatGPT, Bard, ”, Scott Emmons Organizations: Princeton, Virginia Tech, Stanford, IBM, Companies, University of California Locations: San Francisco, Berkeley

In a WhatsApp text conversation this week, we asked Jane Austen — yes, the 19th-century British author — how she felt about Mr. Darcy, a character from one of her most famous works, “Pride and Prejudice.”After a few seconds, Ms. Austen responded. “Ah, Mr. Darcy. Everyone remembers him as one of my characters,” she said, her face appearing in a small window above our conversation. But a modern interpretation of her likeness was used by Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, as part of an artificially intelligent character that could chat across the company’s messaging apps. Characters based on other people’s likenesses — including the former quarterback Tom Brady, the social media influencers Mr.

Persons: Jane Austen —, —, Darcy, “, ”, Austen, “ Ah, Tom Brady, Charlie D’Amelio, Snoop Dogg, Microsoft’s Bing Organizations: Meta, Facebook

☆ The Secret Ingredient of ChatGPT Is Human Advice
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-25 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The technique, “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” is now driving the development of artificial intelligence across the industry. For years, companies like Google and OpenAI have relied on such workers to prepare data used to train A.I. Reinforcement learning from human feedback is far more sophisticated than the rote data-tagging work that fed A.I. Last year, OpenAI and one of its competitors, Anthropic, used freelance workers in the United States through the website Upwork. Hugging Face, another prominent lab, is using U.S. workers hired through the data curation start-ups Scale AI and Surge.

Organizations: Google, Workers Locations: United States, India, Africa, chatbots

ChatGPT can now generate images — and they are shockingly detailed. On Wednesday, OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, released a new version of its DALL-E image generator to a small group of testers and folded the technology into ChatGPT, its popular online chatbot. Called DALL-E 3, it can produce more convincing images than previous versions of the technology, showing a particular knack for images containing letters, numbers and human hands, the company said. By adding the latest version of DALL-E to ChatGPT, OpenAI is solidifying its chatbot as a hub for generative A.I., which can produce text, images, sounds, software and other digital media on its own. Since ChatGPT went viral last year, it has kicked off a race among Silicon Valley tech giants to be at the forefront of A.I.

Persons: ”, Aditya Ramesh, ChatGPT Locations: OpenAI, San Francisco, ChatGPT

☆ Researchers Poke Holes in Safety Controls of ChatGPT and Other Chatbots
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-27 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

But the company said it offered its technology as open source software in an effort to accelerate the progress of A.I. Proponents of open-source software also say the tight controls that a few companies have over the technology stifles competition. And it is likely to become even more contentious because of what the researchers revealed in their report on Thursday. The researchers found that they could break through the guardrails of open source systems by appending a long suffix of characters onto each English-language prompt fed into the system. In similar ways, they could coax the chatbots into generating biased, false and otherwise toxic information.

Organizations: Meta

The largest companies in the tech industry have spent the year warning that development of artificial intelligence technology is outpacing their wildest expectations and that they need to limit who has access to it. Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said on Tuesday that he planned to provide the code behind the company’s latest and most advanced A.I. technology to developers and software enthusiasts around the world free of charge. The decision, similar to one that Meta made in February, could help the company reel in competitors like Google and Microsoft. Those companies have moved more quickly to incorporate generative artificial intelligence — the technology behind OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot — into their products.

Persons: Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg, Meta, Mr Organizations: Meta, Google, Microsoft

The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, the artificial intelligence start-up that makes ChatGPT, over whether the chatbot has harmed consumers through its collection of data and its publication of false information on individuals. In a 20-page letter sent to the San Francisco company this week, the agency said it was also looking into OpenAI’s security practices. asked the company dozens of questions in its letter, including how the start-up trains its A.I. The investigation was earlier reported by The Washington Post and confirmed by a person familiar with the investigation. legislation to oversee the fast-growing industry, which is under scrutiny because of how the technology can potentially kill jobs and spread disinformation.

Persons: Sam Altman, A.I Organizations: Federal Trade Commission, San, The Washington Post Locations: OpenAI, San Francisco

☆ The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-31 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation. On Friday, the Italian government temporarily banned ChatGPT in the country, citing privacy concerns and worries over minors being exposed to explicit material. This allowed him to pursue billions of dollars in financing by promising a profit to investors like Microsoft. His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

Persons: Altman, Mr Organizations: Microsoft Locations: Italian, Napa

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